Dr KARL SHUKER

Zoologist, media consultant, and science writer, Dr Karl Shuker is also one of the best known cryptozoologists in the world. Author of such seminal works as Mystery Cats of the World (1989), The Lost Ark: New and Rediscovered Animals of the 20th Century (1993; greatly expanded in 2012 as The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals), In Search of Prehistoric Survivors (1995), and more recently Extraordinary Animals Revisited (2007), Dr Shuker's Casebook (2008), Karl Shuker's Alien Zoo: From the Pages of Fortean Times (2010), Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery (2012), and Mirabilis: A Carnival of Cryptozoology and Unnatural History (2013), his many fans have been badgering him to join the blogosphere for years. The CFZ Blog Network is proud to have finally persuaded him to do so.

YOU'LL BELIEVE AN ELEPHANT CAN FLY…POSSIBLY? PACHYDERMS WITH WINGS - AND OTHER STRANGE THINGS!

Although I pride
myself on covering the more unusual and unexpected of subjects in this blog,
flying elephants is a first even for ShukerNature. Then again, it is the
festive season – and if we can't suspend disbelief at this time of year (which
is, after all, the one period when our faith in the reality of certain other
gravity-unencumbered ungulates – namely, aerial reindeer - is all but
compulsory), then when can we? So here, as a yuletide diversion, is my
exclusive examination of airborne pachyderms.

And where better
to begin than with the most famous example of all – Walt Disney's Dumbo.

In contrast to
the predominant policy during the first half-century or so of Disney-produced
animated feature films, the movie Dumbo, released in 1941 and Walt Disney
Productions' fourth such feature, was not based upon or even inspired by a
well-known novel or traditional fairy tale. Instead, it emanated directly from
a scarcely-known short story written by Helen Aberson and illustrated by Harold
Pearl that had only just been released in a newly-devised prototype
story-telling toy format known as Roll-A-Book in late 1939 when it was seen by
Kay Kamen, Disney's head of merchandise licensing. When she showed it to Walt
Disney, he was instantly convinced that its rights should be purchased and its story
used as the basis of a future animated feature. This is indeed what happened, very
swiftly too, and the rest is history.

This all-time classic
Disney film centres around a baby travelling-circus elephant christened Jumbo
Junior by his mother, Mrs Jumbo, but whose extra-large ears make him the butt
of spiteful jokes by the other circus elephants, who also cruelly nickname him
Dumbo. And when his mother tries to protect him, she is taken away and imprisoned
in solitary confinement as a mad elephant. Happily, however, Dumbo is briefly
reunited with her in a touching scene that features her singing to him while
still in jail the tear-jerking lullaby 'Baby Mine'. Following an accidental,
champagne-induced bout of inebriation in which he hallucinates a psychedelic
panorama of pink elephants, Dumbo and his only friend, Timothy Mouse, assisted
by a raucous but good-hearted flock of crows, make the astonishing discovery
that he can actually use his huge ears as wings and fly! As a result, Dumbo the
flying elephant soon becomes the star of the entire circus, and his mother,
swiftly released from jail, now proudly resides in her son's opulent private
circus carriage.

At only 64
minutes long, Dumbo is among the shortest of all animated features, but
that didn't prevent it from becoming one of Disney's best-loved cartoon films. It
also won the Academy Award for 'Best Scoring of a Musical Picture' in 1941 (and
'Baby Mine' was nominated that same year for the 'Best Original Song' Academy
Award). Moreover, one of the most popular attractions, especially among small
children, when visiting Disneyland (opened in Anaheim, California, in 1955), Walt
Disney World (opened in Orlando, Florida, in 1971, and
which I visited in 1981), and Disneyland Paris (opened in Paris, France, in 1992) is
the Dumbo merry-go-round.

However, Dumbo is
not the only cartoon flying elephant. Indeed, he is not even Disney's only
cartoon flying elephant.

Down through the
years, Disney has produced a succession of Winnie the Pooh featurettes. The
second and most critically acclaimed of these was Winnie the Pooh and the
Blustery Day, released in 1968, which deservedly won the 'Best Animated
Short Film' Academy Award that year. This was no doubt due to it not only
featuring the screen debut of the very popular and delightfully wacky character
Tigger, but also for including a decidedly surreal but extremely memorable,
song-accompanied dream/nightmare sequence. In this sequence, Pooh desperately
strives to protect his beloved honey from a multi-coloured, polka-dotted plague
of elephants and weasels - or, as Tigger amusingly mispronounces them,
heffalumps and woozles. And among the former contingent of would-be honey
pilferers is an enormous winged bumblebee with the head and the limbs of an
elephant. An elebee, or a bumblephant?

Moving to a very
different but no less spectacular artistic representation of flying elephants:
in 1970, the celebrated fantasy artist Roger Dean was commissioned to prepare
two striking album covers for the Ghanaian Afro-pop band Osibisa, based in London. The result was
a pair of extraordinarily eyecatching, totally unforgettable illustrations. The
first of these, for the band's self-titled debut album, Osibisa, released
by MCA in 1971, featured some flying elephants of normal grey colouration but sporting
huge multicoloured wings and a decidedly sinister, malevolent demeanour. The
second one, for the band's follow-up album, Woyaya, also released by MCA
in 1971, featured a single scarlet-skinned flying elephant equipped with a long
slender pair of translucent dragonfly-like wings, and claws instead of hooves.

Although flying
elephants have yet to feature in any cryptozoological case, one such example
has indeed appeared in a truly delightful publication of the pseudozoological
variety.

I coined the
term 'pseudozoology' quite some time ago to describe spoof publications and
specimens, i.e. books describing totally fictitious creatures but in such a completely sober, straight-faced manner that they deliberately give the impression
that the animals documented by them are real, and specimens created
artificially but afterwards presented or publicly exhibited as if they were
genuine. Originally published in German in 1957 and first published in English
a decade later, perhaps the most famous, celebrated work of pseudozoology is The
Snouters: Form and Life of theRhinogrades. Those were respectively the
colloquial and the formal zoological names given by the book's equally
fictitious German author, Prof. Harald Stümpke, to a unique taxonomic group of
mammals that had lately been discovered in a now-sunken Pacific archipelago. As
chronicled by him in detail, they all exhibited extreme nasal modifications,
enabling certain species to walk upon their noses, and some even to catch prey
with them.

Less familiar
but no less entertaining is Dr. Ameisenhaufen's Fauna, researched by
Joan Fontcuberta and Pere Formiguera, and published in 1988. In this book, they
too describe a range of fantastic creatures all of which were claimed to be
real by the brilliant but mysteriously missing Munich-born zoologist Prof.
Peter Ameisenhaufen (in a delightful, knowing in-joke for pseudozoological
aficionados, Ameisenhaufen is also credited in this book as being closely
associated with rhinograde researcher Harald Stümpke). These creatures include such
wonders as the olpico-nu Cercopithecus icarocornu, a winged unicorn
monkey from Brazil's Amazon jungle; Solenoglypha polipodida, a 12-legged
lizard-like reptile with venomous bite and hypnotic whistle, as well as a
selection of avian attributes, hailing from Tamil Nadu in southern India; and
the hengo-go Threschelonia atis, a tortoise-carapaced ibis from the
Galapagos archipelago. Most astonishing of all, however, is a winged elephant from
Kenya known as the
aerophant, but even the exceedingly open-minded Ameisenhaufen had difficulty in
accepting its reality, which is based principally upon the following dubious photograph:

Flying elephants
may not be known in mainstream zoology, or even in cryptozoology, but they
certainly appear in traditional Eastern legends and lore. For example,
according to one such fable, all elephants were originally winged. One day,
however, an elephant alighted upon a banyan tree somewhere north of the
Himalayas and crashed down upon a meditating holy man sitting beneath its
branches, because the elephant was too heavy for the tree to support its great
weight. The holy man – a yogi named Dirghatapas - was so angered by this that
he cursed the poor elephant, causing its wings to fall off. And since that
fateful day, all elephants have been wingless.

In Chinese
mythology, a white rat called Hua-hu Tiao was kept by Mo-li Shou, one of the
four Diamond Kings of Heaven, inside a bag made from panther skin. But when Mo-li
Shou decided to teach mortal humans the error of their ways, he released Hua-hu
Tiao, who immediately transformed into a white-winged flying elephant and began
devouring them – until it swallowed the hero Yang Chien, who promptly killed
this monstrous beast by tearing its heart in two and ripping open its belly
from the inside.

There is also a
Bhili folktale that tells of how a flying elephant came down from the sky each
night to eat a farmer's sugar cane in his fields, until one night the farmer
lay in wait, and when the elephant landed, he seized hold of its tail. The
elephant flew off, carrying the farmer with it, to the supreme Hindu deity Indra's
kingdom of Paradise. There the
farmer met Indra, who apologised for the elephant's theft and permitted the
farmer to take whatever he wished in recompense. The farmer was content to take
two handful of gems, and he was then carried back down to Earth by the elephant.
Now a rich man, the farmer built a big house for himself and his family, but it
wasn't long before all of his neighbours learnt how he had obtained the gems.

Eager to emulate
his good fortune, they swiftly planted their own field of sugar cane, in order
to lure Indra's heavenly elephant down to Earth, having decided that they too
would be transported to Paradise but would then take back home with them much
more treasure than just two handfuls of gems. When the elephant flew down, they
seized hold of each other in a chain, with the neighbour at one end of the
chain holding the elephant's tail, and in this way they were indeed carried up
towards Paradise when the animal flew away. Unfortunately
for them, however, before they reached their destination the neighbour holding
the elephant's tail stretched open his arms while describing how much wealth he
planned to bring back home, and in so doing he let go of the tail, thus causing
all of the villagers including himself to fall back down to Earth. When Indra
learned of the villagers' greed, he planted a field of sugar cane himself, in Paradise, so that now
his flying elephant would never come down to Earth again, and the villagers
would therefore never be able to reach Paradise in search of its
treasure.

Celestial
flying elephant (original image source unknown to me)

Flying elephants
are also represented diversely in Asian art. For instance: a flying elephant is
the symbol of Koetai (aka Kutai) Kartanegara Sultanate, a regency in Indonesia's East Kalimantan province on the
island of Borneo.

An enormous, venerated
statue of a resplendant winged elephant stands majestically in Chiang Mai in Thailand, where it is a
very popular tourist attraction. And back in Indonesia, especially Bali,
beautifully painted winged elephants carved by local craftsmen from albesia wood
are frequently hung as mobiles in homes and temples there, where they allegedly
chase away evil spirits.

As for the
West: children's author Enid Blyton got in on the act by writing a Noddy book
entitled Noddy and the Flying Elephant, first published in 1952 by
Sampson Low. This was also the first book in the 'NoddyArk' series.

In short: aerial
reindeer may be of seasonal occurrence only, and we all know how likely it is
that pigs will fly. As far as flying elephants are concerned, conversely, they
are clearly a lot more abundant around the world than you may have previously
realised. But please ensure that you don't sit beneath the branches of a tree
in which one has just alighted, because if you do, the fate of Dirghatapas may
not be the only unpleasant experience in store for you. Remember, elephants eat
plenty of fibre...

And finally: if you're wondering why - or how - I've resisted mentioning anything about jumbo jets, it's only because I've been biding my time. For here, ladies and gentlemen, I give you right now, in the following video (kindly brought to my attention by Fortean researcher Bob Skinner), the jumbo jet to end all jumbo jets! Click here, and all will be revealed!

3 comments:

Wonderful overview of flying elephants. I used to collect fantasy role playing game monster books when I was younger and good old Dungeons & Dragons had the Hollyphant. No ordinary one flying elephant the hollyphant was two feet tall and covered in long golden fur. That's right a miniature flying mammoth! Later, more combat oriented, versions of the game also gave it the ability to turn into a giant, bat-winged, humanoid elephant but I always preferred the original cute fluffy mini-mammoth. Wikipedia has an article with the original Monster Manual picture here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollyphant

By the way I love books on pseudozoology (I coined a term for the pretend scientific names found in these types of books, the nomen ludum) and must find Dr. Ameisenhaufen's Fauna for my collection. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

Dear Karl, I have read this article with great interest (as I always do with the entries to your blog). This time I would like contribute to that subject: Did you know there is a short movie entitled "Flying Elephants" (USA 1928) starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as Neanderthalian like people sometime in prehistory? The film features a remarkable sequence with a group of elephants flying over the top of a hill. This part is filmed as a dream sequence said to be referring to a shaman like mythology. Of course it's a funny film, but with regard to the early production year it is quite a remarkable sequence.

Hi Frank, Thanks very much for reminding me of this. I'm a keen Laurel and Hardy fan and have actually seen this film so I feel very embarrassed to have forgotten about it. Thanks again, and also for your kind interest in all of my blog posts.

SHUKERNATURE SURVIVAL

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